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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The biggest thing is that tar sands is a particuarly unclean form of energy.
I mean, say what you will about fracking, but if I recall, it's cleaner (... CO 2 wise...) than other forms of fossil fuel usage.
The oil going through the pipeline wasn't ever going to be sold in the US, anyway. It was just being transported through our land and being sold to everyone but us. So uh... maybe a thousand temp jobs and that would have been it for us.
But yeah, many factors have come together to make the pipeline not very desirable; intense protest in Nebraska, the mentioned oil boom, prices going down, the slow but building move over to renewable sources of power, Canada's own elections landing them with officials that aren't going to push the tar sands oil at all. All of that came together. Mind you, if we end up with a Republican president in this next election Transcanada will probably try to push the issue again. Probably. But I think an outright refusal by Obama now rather than accepting the withdrawal makes it harder to bring it back up later.
@ kkhohoho
You know, the more I think about it, the more the Republicans seem like one big Hive Of Scum And Villainy, or at least a secret evil organization that's not so secret. (At all.
Isn't that what The Simpsons did (Springfield's Republicans meeting in a dark, spooky castle)?
That they did, come to think of it. I guess that just proves I was right.
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Natural gas by itself is less bad but the concearn about fracking, IIRC, was in large part to do with potential contamination of groundwater that supplies a lot of drinking water to those areas and a much more direct potential impact on human health. (My mother's family is from a part of NY where the issue is local. So far I think there's been enough resistance for it not to gain a foothold)
Adding: NY's banned it for now, apparently. Also, as greenhouse gasses go, there are design issues with the wells that if not solved, leak a lot of methane into the air, and methane is worse than CO 2 as greenhouse gasses go. Time and technology may make it doable but it's not all there at the moment.
edited 6th Nov '15 6:02:39 PM by Elle
And speaking of the crazy, Ben Carson's lie about West Point will probably help him
. Possibly because it's ambiguous whether it's actually a lie. Emphasis mine.
There are immediate problems here. There are no scholarships to West Point—all costs are covered for all students. And the only way to get an offer is to apply, but the school has no record of Carson’s application. When pressed by Politico, Carson’s campaign conceded he never applied. “He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors,” explained his campaign manager, Barry Bennett. “They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC. He considered it but in the end did not seek admission.”
This prompted a story—“Ben Carson Admits Fabricating West Point Scholarship” was the original title—and a flurry of activity on Twitter, as Carson supporters and conservative defenders attacked Politico for smearing the former neurosurgeon. “It is true, Carson never applied and was never accepted to West Point,” wrote conservative activist Erick Erickson. “The Politico’s representation of that is demonstrably false and is not something Carson claimed.”
The Carson campaign has also responded. “He was told by the ROTC Commander that he could have an appointment,“ said Doug Watts, a spokesman for the campaign, to the Washington Post. “Dr. Carson rejected the offer, did not apply or pursue admission. Had he done so, and been accepted, that would have been tantamount to a scholarship, the same that all cadets receive."
So, is Politico right? Did Carson “fabricate” his West Point story?
If you judge by the text of his book, as well as other statements about the same story, the answer is not exactly. Carson never claimed that he applied to the school. And while West Point doesn’t give scholarships, it’s not hard to see how encouragement from authority figures—You’re a shoo-in—becomes, after years of telling and retelling, the tale of an offer and a scholarship. It’s just how memory works.
Carson is guilty of run-of-the-mill embellishment. Still, it’s tempting to say that this will harm his campaign. Embellishing about entrance to a military academy doesn’t look good, especially for someone who has built his campaign on honesty and integrity. Some Republicans might just recoil from the former neurosurgeon, in favor of someone else.
But I doubt it. Carson is extraordinarily well-liked among Republican voters—it will take more than an exaggeration to tank his ratings with the grassroots. And indeed, the fact that Politico has had to walk back from its initial claims will work in Carson’s favor. Now this is another case of the “liberal media” on a witch hunt against a strong, conservative Republican.
Far from hurting Ben Carson, this whole flap may strengthen his standing with Republicans, as they rally to defend him. Carson may well stumble in the race for the GOP nomination—I think it’s inevitable—but it won’t be over old memories of college applications.
That's what people have been doing. The guy's memoir is full of it. Plus, the claim regarding West Point was that he received the offer from General Westmoreland (former chief of ops in Vietnam) himself, which was physically impossible because Westmoreland was in a completely different place at the time.
Politico's walking back because they realized they pissed off their base.
Mother Jones: Ben Carson seems to have a serious personal honesty problem.
Basically a list of the known inconsistencies of Carson's past, including digging by the Wall Street Journal.
With all the papers digging into his past plus the Debate, I'm not sure he's going to survive. His opponents can easily paint him as having an Etch-A-Sketch History. "One minute he's a Thug stabbing people, one minute he's a Nerd in the classroom. What was he?".
Also as to concerns of Rubio, I suspect he's going to get eviscerated from the fact he walked back on his immigration reform. He might win the Floridian Cuban bloc of Latinos, if that's the calculus, but I don't see him grabbing much of the rest. Dude is going to immolate under sunlight like a vampire.
Sanders punts on Carson's scholarship question, instead attacking his "absurd views" on Medicare
.
This is interesting. As we know, Sanders refused to fight Hillary over her emails, which was a sign of class that didn't commit him to anything (and avoided getting him drawn into a useless nonstarter). But here, Sanders is making a principled refusal to get involved in a Republican's scandal, which may indicate that he's committing to not engaging in that kind of tactics and debating his opponents solely on the merits of their positions, without getting involved in challenges about their dirty laundry and scandals.
It's a bold move, and it may pay dividends if Sanders can maintain that position until a year from now. On the other hand, if he doesn't maintain that, he's opened himself up to attack.
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Depends on the people killed. Bush's idiocy getting American soilders skilled hurt him, his same idiocy killing foreigners did not. The establishment idiocy that kills many younge black men isn't hurting the Republicans and barely hurts Democrats (it's taken BLM to make it hurt them at all realy).
I'm sitting in the lobby of my hotel which runs FOX News seemingly all the time. My favorite Republican candidate for the primaries is on, Carly Fiorina, talking about Zero-Based Budgeting. She says the idea behind Zero-Based Budgeting is to move away from the economic system where we only talk about increases or decreases in budgeting, resulting in agencies keeping permanent gains and no longer having to justify those in the future.
The idea behind Zero-Based Budgeting would be that instead, each agency has to be accountable for every part of its budget every year. In theory, this would mean that if, say, we gave one agency more money to handle an emergency situation, they wouldn't keep getting that much in the future; they would only have that budget for as long as they needed it.
I really like this concept but, again, the fact that I'm watching FOX News makes me paranoid. Also, I'm not even going to pretend I have an advanced knowledge in economic logistics and long-term consequences. Are there problems with Zero-Based Budgeting that I'm missing?
edited 8th Nov '15 7:26:52 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

I entirely forgot that Pataki was campaigning for the GOP nomination. As a NY person who grew up during his tenure as governor, where does he compare on the crazy scale right now? NY is pretty blue compared to other places in the country and I think NY's current health assistance program was enacted under his tenure (focused mainly on kids, AFAIK) but on the other hand, if you want someone who can tackle budget concerns and deadlocked legislatures, NY has not passed a budget on time in my lifetime.
Also, were there concerns about the Keystone plan other than "we should stop focusing on exploiting oil because global warming"? Cause while I generally agree that we should be working toward clean energy, I'd rather in the meantime that we buy oil from Canada than countries we have rocky and volatile relationships with.
That and, well, I got my driver's licence right when gas was hitting record high prices and staying there for years. I was shocked recently to see it below $2.50. The high price of gas has been a pretty big thing between me and being able to afford vehicle ownership and I'm not willing to take on debt to get a new electric/hybrid.
edited 6th Nov '15 4:24:13 PM by Elle